Next-gen voice market to soar

Worldwide revenue for next-generation voice products will hit $1.35bn in the third quarter of this year, up 31 per cent from the same period in 2002.

Infonetics Research's quarterly worldwide market share and forecast service found that the market reached $312m between April and June, down three per cent on the first three months of the year.

But annual revenue is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 25 per cent to reach $4.3bn by 2006.

Session border controllers, which sit between the carrier and end customer, is set to become the hottest sector.

"Session border controllers are experiencing strong growth because they solve the problems associated with network address translation and firewalls impeding the delivery of these services," said Kevin Mitchell, lead analyst of the report, in a statement.

"Carriers are looking to next-gen voice equipment to create new services and find new revenue possibilities, and in the end that means connecting to customers and delivering hosted IP voice and multimedia services."

The worldwide session border controller market totalled $6m in 2002 and will grow 369 per cent to $30m this year. The market will see explosive growth in 2004 and beyond.

"Among the bright spots this quarter was the IP multimedia segment, which consists of voice application servers and media servers," said Matthias Machowinski, co-author of the report.

"After several quarters of mediocrity, this segment grew 30 per cent in Q2, and is poised to grow 68 per cent this year."

Infonetics found that total media gateway shipments grew six per cent from Q1 to $212m, while soft switches dropped 27 per cent to $76m.